Feminist Keywords: Health, State Violence, and Healthism with Dr. Jenna Loy

Background and Context of Feminist Keywords

  • Publication and Podcast Overview:

    • Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies is a 2021 book published by New York University Press (NYU Press), accessible online at keywords.nyupress.org.
    • The text serves as an accessible resource designed to introduce theoretical concepts and debates across feminist, queer, and trans studies into public and academic spaces, including classroom discussions, kitchen tables, book clubs, and community groups.
    • The volume features 77 thinkers writing entries on 70 critical keywords (e.g., hashtag, intersectionality, reproduction, woman, health).
    • The podcast companion, Feminist Keywords, features interviews with authors discussing the conceptual significance and contemporary urgency of their respective keyword entries.

  • Editorial Collective and Hosts:

    • Host: Amy Bong, Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women Studies at Pomona College.
    • Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective Members:
    • Keila Lozano Tompkins
    • R. N. Azura
    • Karma Chavez
    • Mashana Gohman
    • Ambridge Northwestern
    • Amy Bong

  • Featured Author Profile: Dr. Jenna Loy:

    • Dr. Jenna Loy is a feminist geographer and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin Madison (UW Madison).
    • Research focus centered on state violence, racism, imprisonment, migration detention, militarism, and anti-violence activism.
    • Author of the entry on "Health" in Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies.
    • Author of Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963 to 1978, an investigation into grassroots mobilizations connecting health, social justice, and understandings of violence.
    • Academic Background: Initially intended to pursue medicine; shifted to social sciences and health politics after encountering a cutthroat, hyper-competitive introductory chemistry course at a large university.
    • Theoretical Approach: Analyzes connections across disparate forms of state violence (e.g., the relationship between incarceration, migration detention, and militarism) and incorporates feminist theoretical frameworks showing that interpersonal violence is systemic and intrinsically bound to imperialism, war-making, racism, and colonialism.

Theoretical Foundations: Healthism and Neoliberal Political Economy

  • Definition and Origins of Healthism:

    • Coined and analyzed by Robert Crawford in 1980.
    • Defined as a highly profitable form of medicalization emerging since the 1970s wherein health becomes an ongoing individual project accompanied by mandates for self-regulation that confer individual moral worth.

  • Critique of Lifestyle Health Models:

    • Mainstream paradigms reduce health to rigid lifestyle prescriptions (e.g., eating specific approved foods, exercising 20 minutes daily), completely detached from structural political-economic conditions.
    • Individualized health directives foster victim-blaming directed at poor individuals and fat individuals while obscuring macro-level economic realities.

  • Institutional Co-optation and Corporate Wellness:

    • Institutional health incentivization programs (e.g., automated emails promoting meditation apps or lunchtime walks) co-exist with escalating workplace labor demands that eliminate basic rest periods and force workers to eat desk side.
    • Fitness tracking technologies (e.g., sleep adequacy algorithms) extend surveillance, discipline, and self-monitoring deeper into daily existence.

  • Class Dynamics and Market Commodification:

    • Participating in mandatory healthiness requires significant temporal and financial capital.
    • Overworked individuals lacking time or resources are subjected to guilt and shame for failing to self-regulate.
    • Health imperatives are heavily commodified and linked to guilt: pre-packaged meal preparation kits sell the illusion of homemade nutrition to time-strapped workers, while fad diets colonize supermarket aisles, becoming increasingly costly and exclusionary based on disposable income.

  • Neoliberal Risk Privatization and Individualism:

    • Emerging prominently in the 1980s, neoliberal economics privatizes health while distributing and socializing risk across the general population.
    • Wealthy individuals purchase security within privatized bubbles of protection, destroying collective or socialized concepts of health.
    • Under this model, individual health is framed strictly as personal choice ("my health depends on what I do, yours on what you do"), engendering competitive demonization of the supposedly "irresponsible citizen subject" who lacks self-control.
    • Structural healthcare deficits, lack of insurance, or unsafe conditions are reframed as personal failures to secure better employment, a logic that manifested during pandemic-era backlashes against collective public safety mandates.

Feminist, Queer, and Trans Analysis of Health, Disability, and State Violence

  • Health as a Site of Mobilization and Exploitation:

    • Health and body autonomy are central organizing terrain for feminist, queer, and trans communities seeking non-demeaning, informative, and respectful care.
    • Activism arises directly in response to historical and ongoing bodily violations carried out under the rubrics of ableism, eugenics, and white supremacy.
    • Institutional medicine generated foundational knowledge through the historical exploitation and leveraging of poor people and communities of color, establishing systemic harms that persist despite contemporary patient protection reforms.

  • Weaponization of Health Rationales:

    • Health definitions are weaponized by disciplinary state apparatuses, including child welfare systems, criminalization mechanisms, disability management, and abortion restrictions.
    • Coercive and punitive powers deploy medical rationales to mark deviant bodies, strip individuals of autonomy, and place them outside democratic processes via incarceration and institutionalization.

  • Double-Edged Nature of Body Autonomy:

    • Frameworks centered on personal responsibility and individualized "choice" risk co-opting health movements, undermining radical feminist care collectivities.
    • Conversely, bodily autonomy frameworks serve as powerful sites of mass mobilization, as evidenced by broad post-Dobbs student and youth organizing around reproductive rights.

Co-optation of Radical Terminology and Institutional Violence

  • Case Study: Pomona College Suppression of Student Protests:

    • During student demonstrations protesting violence in Gaza and institutional complicity, administration and law enforcement executed a premeditated police crackdown at Pomona College.
    • Internal communications between the Claremont Police Department and college administration revealed tactical coordination occurred three days prior to police arrival.
    • The operation mobilized surrounding police precincts, deploying 22 to 23 squad cars, full riot gear, bulletproof vests, tactical shields, tear gas canisters, and an assault rifle against students occupying an administrative building.

  • Co-optation of "Mutual Aid":

    • Memos between the police department and college administration explicitly categorized calling in external police precincts as "mutual aid."
    • Demonstrates a total co-optation of radical care terminology, bending concepts of mutual aid toward state securitization and militarized suppression.

  • Reframing Safety, Risk, and Harm:

    • Institutional actions obscure state violence behind rhetoric of safety and security.
    • Student analysis during disciplinary proceedings challenged administrative definitions of safety by pointing out that calling armed police introduced real risk and insecurity—especially to custodial and undocumented staff members—by introducing firearms into the environment.

Public Health Frameworks for Abolition and Anti-Militarism

  • Historical Anti-War Ethics in Medicine:

    • In the 1960s, medical professionals used medical ethics to oppose nuclear war, arguing that medicine could neither treat nor cure post-nuclear casualties, thereby concluding that nuclear weapons must be abolished.

  • Formal Institutional Recognition of Police Violence:

    • The American Public Health Association (APHA) passed an official resolution recognizing policing as a public health issue.
    • The resolution resulted from sustained organizing by health professionals and grassroots activists to destabilize and delegitimize police violence.

  • Denaturalizing State Violence:

    • Framing police and military force as public health crises denaturalizes state violence, drawing directly on 1970s feminist frameworks that denaturalized domestic violence.
    • Asserts that state reliance on police and military control is not natural or unavoidable, advancing abolitionist frameworks for conflict resolution.

Prefigurative Politics, Collective Care, and Bearing Witness

  • Campus Encampment Infrastructure (UW Madison):

    • Student encampments built alternative care structures, establishing organized kitchens, meal plans, educational workshops, and communal living spaces (eating, praying, and celebrating together).
    • Following police repression and partial dismantling, the encampment expanded from two remaining tents to 50 tents over two weeks.
    • Organizers explicitly articulated the space not as recreational camping, but as active political solidarity against war in Gaza and institutional complicity.

  • Bearing Witness vs. Institutional "Cure":

    • Protest tactics involving quiet block occupations and public broadcasts of radio recordings from Gaza residents emphasize slowing down to bear witness to real-world suffering.
    • Rejects institutional rushes toward quick "cures," overcoming, or self-soothing, insisting instead on harm reduction, sitting with suffering, and addressing structural harms at their root.

Key Contributors, Editorial Collective, and Credits

  • Primary Podcast Participants:

    • Host: Amy Bong (Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women Studies at Pomona College).
    • Featured Guest: Dr. Jenna Loy (Feminist Geographer, University of Wisconsin Madison).

  • Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective Members:

    • Keila Lozano Tompkins
    • R. N. Azura
    • Karma Chavez
    • Mashana Gohman
    • Ambridge Northwestern
    • Amy Bong

  • Production and Support Credits:

    • Institutional Support: Professor Karen Thompson, University of Southern California (USC).
    • Audio Engineering: Allison Holly.
    • Publisher: New York University Press (NYU Press).